The Salmon of Doubt

The previous Thursday’s (they had each come in at the end of the week, three of them on a Thursday, four on a Friday) was for .3,232.57. The week before it had been .3,319.14. And so on.

Dirk stood up and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? He felt that his whole world was spinning very slowly in what was, as far as he could judge, an anticlockwise direction. That prompted a vague recollection that the last time he had drunk any tequila, it had made his world spin slowly in a clockwise direction. That was obviously what he needed if he was going to be able to think about this clearly. He rummaged hurriedly through a cupboard full of dusty nine-tenths empty bottles of half-forgotten rums and whiskies and found some. A half-full bottle of mezcal. He poured himself a finger in the bottom of a teacup and hurriedly returned to his statements, suddenly panicking in case the figures vanished while he wasn’t looking.

They were still there. Irregularly large sums regularly paid in. His head began to swim again. What were they? Interest payments that had been accidentally credited to the wrong account? If they were interest payments, that would account for the fluctuations in the amounts. But it still didn’t make sense for the simple reason that over .3,000 interest a week represented the interest on two or three million pounds and was not the sort of thing that the owner of such an amount of money was going to allow to be misplaced, let alone for seven weeks in a row. He took a pull on the mezcal. It marched around his mouth waving its fists, waited a moment or two, and then started to beat up his brain. He wasn’t thinking rationally about this, he realised. The problem was that they were his own accounts, and he was used to reading other people’s. Since they were his own, it was in fact possible for him just to phone up the bank and ask. Except that, of course, they’d be closed now. And he had a horrible feeling that if he phoned them up, the response would be “Whoops, sorry, wrong account. Thank you for bringing this error to our attention. How stupid of us to imagine that this money could possibly belong to you.” Obviously he had to try to work out where it was from before he asked the bank. In fact he had to get the money out of the bank before he asked them. He probably had to get to Fiji or somewhere before he asked them.

Except—suppose the money continued to come in? On reapplying his attention to the papers, he realised something else that would have occurred to him straightaway if he hadn’t been so flustered. There was, of course, a code next to each entry. The purpose of the code was to tell him what kind of entry it was.

He looked the code up. Easy. Each payment had reached his account by international transfer.

That would also account for the fluctuations. International exchange rates. If the same amount of a foreign currency was being transferred each week, then the variations in the rate would ensure that a slightly differing amount actually arrived on each occasion. It would also explain why it didn’t arrive on exactly the same day each week. Although it only took less than a second to make a computerised international transfer of money, the banks liked to make as much fuss as they possibly could about it so that the funds would swill around profitably in their system for a while.

But which country were the payments coming from? And why?

“Kevin,” said the Irish-Swedish voice. “Kieran.”

“Oh, shut up!” shouted Dirk suddenly.

That provoked a response. The small border terrier lying, perplexed, in a basket in the corner of the room looked up excitedly and yipped with pleasure. It had not reacted at all to any of the names that the elderly computer on the table next to it had been reciting from a text file of babies’ names, but the creature obviously just enjoyed being told to shut up and was keen for more. “Kimberly,” said the computer. Nothing. The dog with no name looked disappointed.

“Kirby.”

“Kirk.” The dog slowly settled back down into its basket of old newspapers and resumed its previous posture of baffled distress.

Old newspapers. That was what Dirk needed.

A couple of hours later he had the answer, or at least some kind of an answer. Nothing that went so far as to make any kind of actual sense, but enough to make Dirk feel an encouraging surge of excitement: he had managed to unlock a part of the puzzle. How big a part he didn’t know. As yet he had no idea how big a puzzle he was dealing with. No idea at all.